A Bad Day

• Catherine Schinkel, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2011

Mrs Janet Williams was having a very bad day.
It started with the weather. Mrs Williams woke up and looked outside. It was cold, wet and there was not a blue speck in the sky to be seen. As she was getting breakfast for her young children, Macy and Jim, she discovered food was non-existent in the house. She gave her children the last of the eggs and only had coffee left for herself. An hour later, Mrs Williams and her children were on the road – thank God she had fuel in her tank!
Driving to the marketplace was a tedious task. First she had to get the children in the car, get them to be quiet and then get them out again. As they walked through the grocery store her little darlings could not stop whining.
“Mummy, I want a milkshake!”
“Mummy, I want a lolly!”
“Mummy!”
“Mummy!”
“Mummy!”
Mrs Williams felt incredibly guilty about the fact that she was not able to buy her children treats. She wanted to desperately, however, could not afford it. She had only scraped together her last cents for the bare essentials – another contribution to the bad day.
Mrs Williams had absolutely no idea how she was going to pay the rent. She didn’t get paid until next week – she was so over temp work as none of the computers ever worked right. As she was mulling this over, she walked right by the sign for the fruit sale to which she did not notice at all (having only found out about it two hours later via a gossiping friend before the phone line was cut off).
The highest point of Mrs Williams day was the discovery of the half price beetroot. The smile faded as she realised no one in the family likes beetroot. She continued to push her trolley down the aisle of the store listing the things she still needed to do. “Pay the light bill, the water bill and clean the house”. As they reached the end of the aisle her children started to whine again.
“Mummy I want this!”
“Mummy I want that!”
They promptly shut their mouths when their mother told them no and if they didn’t stop asking they weren’t getting any dessert tonight. As they continued to walk behind, they noticed their mum was having rather a lot of trouble pushing the trolley.
It was at this moment that the children decided to help their mum. Mrs Williams was very grateful of their thoughtfulness but was not happy when they tried to pull the trolley around the corners making everything much, much worse. Not only did they proceed to knock over three stands of cans, they managed to travel down four aisles in the space of three seconds.
After this extremely embarrassing episode Mrs Williams paid for their groceries and left the store. Now came the hard part – getting the trolley across the car park.
This was probably the worst part of the day for poor Mrs Williams. Even hovering ten centimetres off the ground the trolley would still turn slightly to the left.